A familiar sight in restaurants is a server attempting accurately to cut a cake or pie and get the pieces out of the pan or off of the plate in a unitary and appealing condition. Especially for the first piece, the attempt is usually far from successful and often ends up as part of a server's meal. As a consequence, fewer than optimum slices are frequently produced, because of damage or because of inaccurate proportioning of the slices.
Such wastage is never to be encouraged, and some efforts have been made to overcome the difficulties. The most common expedient is a template applied over the pastry which is used as a guide for the knife. This is slow manual labor, and still leaves the pieces unseparated even though they have been cut apart.
There has been an effort, exemplified by Meier U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,148, to insert a separator between each pair of adjacent pieces, utilizing a template as a guide for a knife which drives the separator into the pastry. In this device the user manually inserts the separators with as many individual manipulations as there are to be pieces. This is a slow, inefficient device and technique, which requires many inefficient movements, each of which can involve the risk of error or spoilage.
It is an object of this invention to provide a processor to divide pastries and to insert separators between adjacent pieces in an accurate and expeditious way. Manipulations can be reduced by half, and the processor can be constructed in a way that it can readily be cleaned and maintained to food handling standards.
The term "pastries" is used generically to encompass all types of edibles that are to be divided into wedge-shaped portions. Examples are pies and cakes, and also the more exotic desserts such as mousse pies and the like. The costliness of some of these products is such that restaurants and bakeries can no longer afford the wastage which is so frequently attractive to the servers.